The Peripheral (24 page)

STERILE

T
he bar was locked. He pressed his thumb against the oval of brushed steel again. Nothing happened.

But this seemed inconsequential, he noted, as he lowered his hand. Perhaps how it would feel to have had the laminates installed, in Putney. Sufficiently uncharacteristic a thought that he glanced around, as if to be sure that no one had seen him entertain it. He was, he judged, in some complex bio-pharmacological state, the Medici having toyed with his dopamine levels, receptor sites, something. Enjoy it, he advised himself, though perhaps it wasn’t quite that simple.

From Ash, he’d understood that he’d fallen immediately and deeply asleep, on stretching out upstairs, before waking to Burton’s arrival. The Medici, she’d said, had emulated the effect of much more REM sleep than he’d actually gotten, and done other things as well. But after he’d helped her get Ossian into the chair, to have his shoulder repaired, she’d insisted that Netherton go back to sleep. Which he had, after a second application of the Medici. Having just seen it do something very unpleasant looking to Ossian, not to mention bloody, this had seemed less than fastidious, though he knew that at its nanoscale of operation it was constantly sterile.

He’d awakened again, and descended the cheese-grater stairs, alone except for the peripherals in their respective cabins. Flynne’s friend Conner had left his on Lev’s grandfather’s baronial bed, arms spread cruciform, ankles primly together.

Lowbeer’s sigil appeared now, with its coronet, pulsing. He happened to be looking in the direction of the desk, its thronelike chair behind
it, so that the sigil momentarily suggested the crown of some ghost executive of Milagros Coldiron, itself a sort of ghost corporation.

“Yes?”

It stopped pulsing. “You’ve slept,” Lowbeer said.

“Flynne’s brother arrived,” he said, “unexpectedly.”

“He was rigorously selected by the military,” she said, “for an unusual integration of objective calculation and sheer impulsivity.”

Netherton moved his head slightly, placing the sigil over the window, but then it looked as if a coronet-headed figure were outside, looking in. “I suppose,” he said, “that he does seem more balanced than the other one.”

“He wasn’t, initially,” she said. “Their service records have survived here, from before Lev touched their world. Both were damaged, to various extents.”

Netherton moved to the window, thinking he’d seen a pulse of squidlight. “I didn’t like him using her peripheral.” Another arch pulsed and he saw Ossian, walking toward the Gobiwagen in a peculiar way, arms at his sides and slightly bent, hands held forward at the waist. “Ossian looks as though he’s pushing something that isn’t there,” he said.

“A Russian pram. I’m having a technical in Lev’s stub take it apart.”

“A pram?” Then he remembered the cloaked buggy, in the entranceway.

“We make it very difficult to secure prohibited weapons. The ones extracted from that pram will be entirely sterile.”

“Sterile?” Thinking of the Medici.

“Devoid of identification.”

“Why would you want them?”

“Have you eaten?” she asked, ignoring his question.

“No.” He realized that he was actually hungry.

“Best wait, then,” said Lowbeer.

“Wait?”

But her sigil was gone.

BACKDOOR TO NOW

F
ab was one end of the strip mall, the end nearest town, Sushi Barn the other, three empty stores in between. The one next to Fab had done pretty well when those little paintball robots were hot. One next to that had been nails and hair extensions. She couldn’t remember the one between that and Sushi Barn ever having been anything but vacant.

Burton pulled the rental into the lot, parked in front of the former mini-paintball place, windows pasted over on the inside with sticky gray plastic, starting to peel at the corners. “This is ours now,” he said.

“What is?”

“This.” Pointing straight ahead.

“Rented it?”

“Bought it.”

“Who did?”

“Coldiron.”

“They bought that?”

“Bought the mall,” he said. “Closed on it this morning.”

“What’s that mean, ‘closed’?”

“Ours. Papers are going through right now.”

She didn’t know whether it was harder to imagine having the money to buy this place, or to imagine wanting to. “What for?”

“Macon needs a place to keep his printers, we need a place to work out of. Shaylene’s back room won’t cut it. She’s already sold the business to Coldiron—”

“She has?”

“That meeting she had with you, then what she saw Macon fabbing.
Got herself right in. We can’t be running our end out of a trailer down by the creek. So we centralize here. Gets the heat away from Mom, too.”

“Guess it does that, anyway,” she said.

“We’ve got drones over here, more on the way. Carlos is on that. It’ll cut us out of that dumbfuck with lawyers driving over from Clanton, bags of cash. Might as well be builder money, that way. Can’t put it in the bank, can’t pay taxes on it, and we get a haircut every time any’s laundered. If we’re working for Coldiron USA, incorporated right here, that’s a salary. Salary and shares. Corporate headquarters.”

“So what does Coldiron USA do?”

“Property development,” he said, “today. Lawyers have papers for you to sign.”

“What lawyers?”

“Ours.”

“What papers?”

“Incorporation stuff. Buying the mall. Your contract as CCO of Milagros Coldiron USA.”

“I am fucking not. What’s CCO?”

“Chief communications officer. You are. You just haven’t signed yet.”

“Who decided? Not me.”

“London. Ash told me when I was up there with them.”

“So what are you, if I’m CCO?”

“CEO,” he said.

“Know how stupid that sounds?”

“Talk to Ash. You’re CCO, communicate.”

“We aren’t doing that timely a job communicating ourselves, Burton,” she said. “You keep agreeing to shit without asking me first.”

“It’s all moving that fast,” he said.

Conner’s Tarantula swung, growling, into the empty parking lot, to brake beside them, coughing the smell of fried chicken until he killed the engine. She looked down, saw him grinning up at her.

“What did they put him in?” Burton asked her.

“Cross between a ballet dancer and a meat cleaver,” she said, as Conner squinted up at her. “Martial arts demonstrator.”

“Bet he was loving that,” said Burton.

“Too much,” she said, and opened her door. Burton got out on his side, walked around front.

Conner twisted his head, to see her. “Let’s get back where there’s all the fingers,” he said.

She rapped him with a knuckle, hard, on top of his stubbled head. “Don’t go forgetting who took you up there. My brother’s gone native there. Thinks we’ve got a startup going, that he’s CEO of. Don’t get like that.”

“Fingers, legs ’n’ shit, that’s all I want. Brought my catheter. In a ziplock, on the back of the trike.”

“Now that’s exciting,” she said.

Burton was unstrapping him.

“Lady, gents,” said Macon, opening the blank gray glass door from inside, “our North American flagship and headquarters.” He wore a blue business shirt, with a striped tie that was mostly black. Every button buttoned, but the crisp tails weren’t tucked into his holey old jeans.

“Not casual Friday,” Flynne said, seeing Shaylene, behind Burton, in a navy skirt-suit, still managing her big hair thing but looking surprisingly office-ready.

“Hey, Shaylene,” Burton said. He bent over and picked up Conner, like you’d pick up a ten-year-old who couldn’t walk. Conner slid his left arm, his only arm, around Burton’s neck, like he was used to it.

“Conner,” Shaylene said. “How’re you doing?” She seemed different now, Flynne wasn’t sure how.

“Hangin’ in,” said Conner, and used his crooked arm to pull himself up to where he could give Burton a big wet smack on the cheek.

“Could just drop an asshole on the concrete,” Burton said, like he was thinking out loud.

“Let’s get in out of the public eye,” Conner said. Macon stepped
back, out of the doorway. Burton carried Conner in, Flynne behind them. Then Shaylene, who closed the door behind her. One big room, lit by shiny new work-LEDs on clean yellow cables. Musty smell. Gyprock walls randomly patched with paint, showing where counters and dividers had been before. Someone had sawn a doorway through, just a raw door-shaped hole, from the back room of Fab. Covered with a blue tarp, on the Fab side. A couple of new electric saws lay beside it on the floor.

Further back, there were three new hospital beds, partially extracted from their factory bubble wrap, white mattresses bare, and three IV stands, plus a lot of white foam cartons, stacked high as Flynne’s head. “What’s all this?” she asked.

“Ash tells me what we’ll need, I order it,” Macon said.

“Looks like you’re setting up a ward,” Flynne said. “Smells, for a hospital.”

“Plumber’s on the way to fix that,” Shaylene said. “Electrical’s good to go, and the mini-paintball guys put in a shitload of outlets. Going to try to get it cleaned up, working around whatever we wind up doing here.”

“Those beds are for us,” Flynne said to Burton. “We’re going back together, aren’t we?”

“Conner first,” Burton said, carrying him to the nearest bed and putting him down on it.

“Just finished printing him a new phone,” said Macon. “Same as yours, Flynne. Ash wants him to acclimate more, work out. They can run training sequences for him through the peripheral’s cloud AI.”

Flynne looked at Macon. “You sound pretty well up on things there,” she said.

“Biggest part of the job,” Macon said. “It mostly makes its own kind of sense, then you hit something that seems impossible, or just completely wrong, and she either explains it or tells you to ignore it.”

She looked back and saw Burton and Shaylene talking. Couldn’t
hear what they were saying, but Shaylene’s thing about Burton looked to her to be gone. “She sell Fab, to them?” she asked Macon.

“Did,” he said. “Don’t know what she got for it, but they’ve totally got her attention. Which is good, because I’m too busy to wrangle stuff that’s late, and she’s a natural at that.”

“She get along with Burton?”

“Just fine.”

“Used to be awkward,” Flynne said, “like a whole day or two ago.”

“I know,” Macon said. “But before this, she’d managed to feed herself, and a bunch of other people in this town, with a business that wasn’t Hefty, wasn’t building drugs, and was at least partly unfunny. That way, I’d say she hasn’t actually changed much. Just gotten more focused.”

“I wouldn’t have expected she’d get over that, about Burton.”

“What’s changing here,” he said, “is economics,” and the look on his face reminded her of being in Civics with him, when they’d studied the electoral college. He’d been the only one who really got it. She remembered him sitting up straight, explaining it to them. Same look.

“How’s that?”

“Economy,” he said. “Macro and micro. Around here’s micro. Pickett’s not the biggest money in this county anymore.” He raised his eyebrows. “Macro, though, that’s mega weird. Markets all screwy everywhere, everybody’s edgy, Badger’s buzzing, crazy rumors. All just since Burton came back from Davisville. That’s us, causing all that. Us and them.”

“Them?” She remembered how good he’d been at math, better than anybody, but then they’d graduated and he’d had family needed taking care of, college no option. He was one of the smartest people she knew, good as he was at helping you forget it.

“Ash tells me there’s somebody else, up there, able to reach back here. You know about that?”

She nodded. “Hiring people, to kill us.”

“Uh-huh. Ash says there’s two different anomalous proliferations of subsecond extreme events in the market, right now. Us and them. You understand subsecond financial shit?”

“No.”

“Markets are full of predatory trading algorithms. They’ve evolved to hunt in packs. Ash has people with the tools to turn those packs to Coldiron’s advantage, nobody the wiser. But whoever else is up there, with their own backdoor to now, they’ve got the same tools, or near enough.”

“So what’s it mean?”

“I think it’s like an invisible two-party world war, but economic. So far, anyway.”

“Macon, honey,” called Conner, from his hospital bed, framed by a corona of ragged bubble-pack, “bring a wounded warrior his catheter. It’s out on the back of my trike. Wouldn’t want some dickbag stealing it.”

“Or maybe I’m just crazy,” said Macon, turning to go.

Flynne went to the very back of the room, behind the beds and the IV stands, and stood looking at the barred, unwashed windows, dusty cobwebs in their corners, dead flies and spider eggs dangling. Imagined, behind her, kids paintballing their little robots and tanks in the big sandbox they’d had in here. Seemed forever long ago. A couple of days seemed a long time, now. She imagined the spider eggs hatching, something other than spiders coming out, she had no idea what. “Predatory algorithms,” she said.

“What?” Conner asked.

“Haven’t got a clue,” she said.

DROP BEARS

S
he’ll ring you,” Ash said, passing Netherton a U-shaped piece of colorless transparent plastic, like something to hold back a young girl’s hair. “Put it on.”

Netherton looked at the thing, then at Ash. “On?”

“Your forehead. Haven’t eaten, I hope?”

“She suggested I wait.”

Ash had, ominously, come equipped with the polished-steel wastebasket he remembered from Flynne’s initial arrival. It stood, now, beside the crow’s nest’s longest section of gray upholstery.

Lowbeer’s sigil appeared. “Yes?” he asked, before it could pulse.

“The autonomic cutout, please,” said Lowbeer.

He saw that Ash was descending the stairway, taut wires vibrating with her every step. He gingerly settled the flimsy yoke across his forehead, nearer hairline than brows.

“Best you fully recline,” said Lowbeer, her tone reminding him of dental technicians.

Netherton did, reluctantly, the upholstered bench all too eagerly adjusting itself to more comfortably support his head.

“Eyes closed.”

“I hate this,” said Netherton, closing his eyes. Now there was nothing but the sigil.

“With your eyes closed,” said Lowbeer, “count down from fifteen. Then open them.”

Netherton closed his eyes, not bothering to count. Nothing happened. Then something did; he saw Lowbeer’s sigil, just for an
instant, as though it were some ancient photographic negative. Opened his eyes.

The world inverted, slammed him down.

He lay curled on his side in an entirely gray place. The light, what little there was, was gray as every visible thing. Beneath something very low. It would have been impossible to stand, or indeed to sit up.

“Here,” said Lowbeer. Netherton craned his neck. Huddled, too near his face, was something unthinkable. A brief, whining sound, then he realized he’d made it himself. “The Australian military,” Lowbeer said, “call these drop bears.” The thing’s blunt, koala-like muzzle, unmoving when she spoke, was held slightly open, displaying a nonmammalian profusion of tiny crystalline teeth. “Reconnaissance units,” she said, “small, expendable. These two were haloed in, then guided here. How are you feeling?” Its blank gray eyes were round and featureless as buttons, the color of its hairless face. Mechanical-looking concave ears, if they were ears, swiveled fitfully, independent of one another.

“You didn’t,” said Netherton. “Not here. Please.”

“I did,” Lowbeer said. “You’re not nauseous?”

“I’m too annoyed to be sick,” Netherton said, realizing as he said it that it was true.

“Follow me.” And the thing crawled quickly away from him, toward some source of light, head low to avoid the ceiling, if it were a ceiling. Terrified of being left behind, Netherton crawled after it, gagging slightly at glimpses of his forepaws, which had opposed thumbs.

Clearing the overhang, whatever it was, Lowbeer’s peripheral rose on short hind legs. “On your feet.”

Netherton found himself standing, without being certain how that had been accomplished. He glanced back, seeing that they’d apparently crawled from beneath a bench in an alcove. Everything was that milky translucent gray. The glow ahead, he guessed, was moonlight, filtering down through however many membranes of revolting architecture.

“These units,” Lowbeer said, “are already being consumed by the island’s assemblers, which devour anything not of their own making, from flecks of drifting polymer to more complex foreign objects. As we’re currently being eaten, our time here is short.”

“I don’t want to be here at all.”

“No,” said Lowbeer, “but remember, please, that you were very recently employed in a scheme to monetize this place. You may dislike it intensely, but it’s as real as you are. More so, perhaps, as there are presently no schemes to monetize you. Now follow me.” And the koala-like form was suddenly bounding, partially on all fours, in the direction of further light. Netherton followed, immediately discovering an unexpected agility. Lowbeer led the way, across a blank, repulsive landscape, or perhaps floorscape, as they seemed to be within some enclosed structure larger than Daedra’s hall of voice mail. Vast irregular columns lined either side, much nearer on their right. The surface over which they ran was uneven, slightly rippled.

“I hope you’ve some compelling reason for this,” Netherton said, catching up with her, though he knew that people like Lowbeer didn’t need reasons, whether to put Annie Courrèges on a moby for Brazil or to bring him here.

“Whim, quite likely,” she said, confirming his thought. The bears’ exertions didn’t seem to affect her speech, or his. “Thought perhaps it will help you remember what I tell you here. For instance, that my investigation currently seems to hinge on a point of protocol.”

“Protocol?”

“The corpse of al-Habib,” she said, “if it wasn’t touched in the attack, but rather lay where it fell, makes no sense whatever in terms of protocol. The protocols of a low-orbit American attack system most particularly.”

“Why?” asked Netherton, clinging to the mere fact of conversation as to a life preserver.

“A system prioritizing her security would have immediately neutralized any possibility of his posing a posthumous threat.”

“Who?” asked Netherton.

“Al-Habib,” she said. “He might, for instance, have been implanted with a bomb. Considering his bulk, quite a powerful one. Or a swarm weapon, for that matter. The system saw to the others.” Netherton remembered the silhouette of the flying hand. “Protocol required him to be dealt with in the same fashion. He wasn’t. There must have been a strategic reason for that. Slow a bit, now.” Her hard gray forepaw tapped his chest. Distinctly, claws. “They’re nearby.”

Music. Aside from the scuffing of his and Lowbeer’s feet, the first local sound he’d heard since arriving here. Like the tones of the wind-walkers, but lower, more organized, ponderously rhythmic. “What’s that?” Netherton asked, halting entirely.

“A dirge for al-Habib, perhaps.” She’d stopped as well. Her ears rotated, searching. “This way.” She steered him to the right, toward the long base of the nearest column, then forward again, alongside it. As they neared its corner, she dropped on all fours and crept forward, to peer around it, like something from a children’s book, but gone appallingly wrong. “And here they are.”

Netherton braced his right paw on the column and leaned over Lowbeer’s bear, until he could see around the corner. A sizable throng of small, gray, predictably horrid figures squatted, around the upright corpse of the boss patcher. He was hollow now, Netherton saw, membrane thin, like the island’s architecture. Eyeless, the cavern of his mouth agape, he appeared to be propped up with slender lengths of silvered driftwood.

“Incorporating him into the fabric of the place,” Lowbeer said. “But not about myth so much as plastic. Each cell in his body replaced with a minim of recovered polymer. He’s made his escape, you see.”

“His escape?”

“To London,” Lowbeer said. “Americans enabled that, by not destroying his apparent remains. Though he’s always been a bit of an escape artist, our Hamed. Minor Gulf klept. Dubai. But a fifth son. Quickly the black sheep. Very black indeed. Had to flee in his late
teens, under a death warrant. The Saudis particularly wanted him. The aunties knew where he was, of course, though I’d quite forgotten about him myself. And we wouldn’t tell the Saudis, of course, unless it became worth our while. His mother’s Swiss, by the way, a cultural anthropologist. Neoprimitives. That would be what he based his patchers on, I imagine.”

“He faked his death?” The music, if it could be called that, was a largely subsonic auger, boring into Netherton’s brain. He straightened, stepping back from Lowbeer and the column. “I can’t do this,” he said.

“Faked it most complexly. The peripheral’s DNA is that of an imaginary individual, albeit with a now highly documented past. I imagine Hamed’s own DNA is fairly imaginary by now, for that matter, by way of keeping a step ahead of the Saudis. But I’m taking mercy on you, Mr. Netherton. I can see how difficult this is for you. Close your eyes.”

And Netherton did.